The party’s own record of a burglary that became a rescue, a rescue that became a riot, a dead man who is ten years fresher than he ought to be, the bones of a saint carried through a window in a bag, and a festival at which the entire town is currently waiting for us to say something. These notes are being written very quickly.
The highest floor we knew about
We resumed exactly where the record stopped: top of the stairs in Lady Wachter’s house, dressed as commoners, unrested, with a timer running in all our heads. The great map at the stairhead is framed, glassed, and nailed down like an heirloom — extracting it quietly is a project for people with time, which we are not. The contingency plan, recorded here without shame: when everything inevitably goes bad, smash it and take it on the way out.
First door: locked, said Lily’s caution. Not locked at all, said Lily’s sleight of hand, which came in at thirty. She is the master of unlocking. We went in.
The man who died ten years ago, minutes ago
The master bedroom held a family portrait — father, mother, two mischievous sons, a baby daughter — and, stretched on the canopy bed, a very still man with two coins on his eyes. Drew’s medicine check said freshly dead — minutes. Our collected arcana said something worse: Gentle Repose, the little spell that stops the clock on a corpse. Ten days per casting. The DM helpfully reminded us that Lord Wachter died about ten years ago. Someone has re-cast that spell, faithfully, every ten days, for a decade. There is one bed in that room, and it is his, and the other side of it has clearly been slept in.
We have seen a fake pentagram, a skeleton ward, and a fiend on a shoulder, and we are prepared to state that this bedroom is the creepiest thing in that house.
Osric proposed taking the body as collateral. We record that this was proposed, debated with more seriousness than it deserved, and declined. We also record the stage play A Weekend at Father Bernard’s, which one of us has apparently seen seven times.
The bone-less box
The closet held an iron chest on a high shelf. Sirius said “search for traps” slightly after Lily had opened it, which is why the poison needle put her on the floor unconscious. (He lay-on-handsed her back. Guidance was also dispensed. So much guidance.) Inside: coin bearing the devil’s face — apparently that’s just what money looks like here — a Druid Priestess’ Tome full of ritual diagrams none of us can read, and a letter from He Who Shall Not Be Named to Lady Wachter. An actual letter. From him. To her. It smells of crime and it went straight into the bag of holding.
What the box did not contain was bones. Bone-less box.
Verboten
The rest of the floor, briefly: two posh voices in one room (“Come on, Jack — you can do better than that”), a doctor’s sickroom with a comatose man wearing two neat holes in his neck, and behind the moaning door — Ireena, of all people, tending a catatonic girl we believe to be Stella Wachter, and telling us what a saint the lady of the house is.
We also met the sons. Nikolai and Karl are, we want this minuted, lovely. Perfectly normal, deeply dim, four-and-a-half-stars-would-drink-with-again nobles, who each separately asked whether we were wizards, and each separately told us the one rule of the house: “Mama’s room is verboten. Never.”
Drew took Ireena aside and finally — finally — told her everything. The crates. The pentagram. The dead man from the Reformation Center. The letter. We apologized for keeping her out of every loop; her only question was why we hadn’t told her before, and we did not have a good answer. And then Ireena Kolyana, doom-magnet of Barovia, paid us back in full: the supplies come from a secret room off the library.
Plain as grass
Behind that secret door, on a tarpaulin, neatly ordered: the bones of St. Andral. Plus five scrolls. That was the moment Lady Wachter came up the stairs, and the moment initiative was rolled, and the record becomes a series of contemporaneous shouts:
- Sirius, needing the boys out of his way, opened the forbidden door and pointed them at the bed: “Is that Papa?” We are not proud of it. It worked. Karl’s voice, later, through a closed door: “Mama, I think we’ve got some questions for you.” — “Not now, Karl.” — “But it’s disgusting.” — “We will talk about this later.”
- The bones went into the bag of holding. Lady Wachter reached the landing in time to see us, said — quietly, which was worse — “The bones,” and ran for the room.
- Drew smashed the window mostly-safe, barricaded the door with furniture, and got herself and the haul out onto the roof. Sirius, before jumping, bellowed at theatrical volume for the benefit of a house full of commoners: “BLASPHEMY! She stole the bones of St. Andral! We must return them to the church!” — then went through the window, took six slashing, and called it a tithe.
- Lily’s escape plan was to be a small child in a commoner’s cloak. Ernst Larnak looked directly at her, twice, saw a child, shoved past her roughly, and left. Me baby. Just a baby.
- The fiend raven, previously knifed out of the air by said baby, ended the scene perched on Lady Wachter’s shoulder. Their final form.
Everyone got out. It was roughly this point we realized nobody could state with confidence where Ireena ended up. We are aware of how that sentence reads in context. It is on the list.
Bones first
At the burnt church — sixty-five percent gone, no roof, Father Lucian sitting on the steps holding the little sunburst like it was the last one in the world — we pushed the altar aside and laid the bones on the sub-altar below, respectfully, with the Father. And the ground answered. A wave of holy warmth rolled out through the ruin and past it, and for the first time since the fire this place felt like a sanctuary again. Lucian, with the precision of the truly exhausted: “I’m not going to say it’s a bit late. But thank you regardless. We needed this.”
We won one. Write it down: we actually won one.
Most of him back
Then Izek arrived, towing Fëanor. “A token of friendship — we are re-releasing him into your custody.” He snapped the prisoner’s armband off with the words “You can have most of him back,” which is the closest thing to a joke we have ever heard from the flame-armed man, and we hate that we sort of like him now.
Fëanor has lost two days. His last memory is walking into a room to ask a man about nails, and then — a nice boy. Boy height. Very boy-like. We know that boy. Enough of us have been upstairs in the Baron’s house now to have a rule about it.
Izek also told us what officially happened yesterday: there were no vampires. There were seditious agitators in very obvious masks, throwing firebombs. He thanked us for our help against “the masked men.” This is a man who grabbed a vampire by the skull and burned it alive while weeping over his guards, and he now recites the Baron’s version to our faces. And then he took the letter — our letter, the evidence — and walked off to the Baron with it, and there was nothing we could do.
The bill for our “victory” arrived within the hour, by town crier: festival moved up to tomorrow midday. Attendance mandatory for every soul in Vallaki. Bring your sick, bring your grieving. All will be well. Lady Wachter to be hanged on the strength of our testimony. And Henrik — poor, frightened, coffin-making Henrik — arrested and sent to the Reformation Center for “harboring the seditious elements.” (A side debate on whether coffin-making is an inherently sinister trade is recorded and unresolved. “You tell me the last time you met a coffin maker you thought was a fine, upstanding servant of the Morning Lord.” — “People always die. It’s one of the most stable incomes in the village.” — “Compelling.”)
Overnight
Barovia paid more attention to us in the night, which is how it feels when we get stronger here. We are level five. Drew can now make weapons into arcane firearms (“I get a gun”), and celebrated by donating Lady Wachter’s liberated beets to the Blue Water’s one-meal-a-week ration crisis. You get a beet. You get a beet.
Two departures to record. Muriel Vinshaw resigned in the morning: “Yesterday was too rich for my blood. I thought I was it, but turns out I’m not.” We owe her several lives and a great deal of pecking. And Sirius greeted the dawn by summoning his level-five privileges: a celestial horse, gleaming, glorious, mud repelling itself from the hooves, the single most conspicuous object in a starving burned town. Fëanor, whose god has never given him anything: “When I turned twelve, the Morning Lord gave me a book token.” The horse’s name is Clancy. When Plan A and Plan B don’t work — Plan C.
Where the record stops
The Festival of the Blazing Sun, in torrential rain: children dressed as flowers, a ten-foot wicker sun hoisted on a scaffold, the Baron with his torch declaring death meaningless and inviting us — “these five fine examples of heroism” — to attest that Lady Wachter consorts with the devil. “They will attest.”
And then Lady Wachter herself, up on the fountain’s lip, giving the counter-sermon of her life: the Baron’s sunlight as fake as his smile, the dead scorned, “They WERE vampires — he could not protect you,” and — publicly, for the first time — that the Baron’s son abused her daughter and was never punished. “They will attest. They will back me up.”
The crowd is soaked, bereaved, furious at everyone, and turning to look at us.
That is where these notes end: mid-square, mid-rain, every soul in Vallaki waiting to hear whose side we are on.
Where we stand
- Level 5. New toys barely tested: arcane firearm, uncanny dodge, spirit guardians, extra attacks, one (1) celestial horse named Clancy.
- The bones of St. Andral are back on the sub-altar and the sanctuary held a holy wave when they landed. But attendance at the festival is mandatory — which means right now, nobody is guarding them. The Ravens were asked to watch.
- The letter is gone. Izek took Strahd’s letter to the Baron — and the letter, read carefully, favors the Baron’s continued rule. Our best evidence now lives with the man it flatters.
- We are standing in the town square between two speeches, publicly named as witnesses by both sides. The evidence we can still show favors condemning Wachter (Ernst ordered the coffins to Henrik’s; the bones were in her library). The hanging is scheduled on our word.
- Ireena’s location is unknown to us. Last confirmed: in the library room, helping us, in the house of the woman we just robbed. We did this twice now.
- Muriel is gone (amicably). Henrik is in the Reformation Center. Fëanor is missing two days. Stella Wachter is catatonic, and her mother just told the whole town why.
- Unread/unspent: the Druid Priestess’ Tome (Druidic), five scrolls (at least one Gentle Repose), a memorized fragment of the war map (wolves, moon, the goat hill).
- Food crisis in Vallaki: one meal per week at the inn. We are distributing beets.
Questions on our minds
- Whom do we attest for? Damning Wachter feeds a tyrant and hangs a woman on evidence we can no longer produce. Damning the Baron means our word against a mind-wiping family. Damning both means a riot with us at the center. The crowd hates everyone. So do we.
- What does the Baron do with Strahd’s letter — the one that reads “keep him in power”? Does he even understand what he’s holding?
- Where is Ireena? And what does Lady Wachter do with the guest who betrayed her house?
- Was Victor what broke Stella? Her mother thinks so, and said so to the whole town. Two mind-wiped party members suggest she’s right.
- Who re-casts Gentle Repose on Lord Wachter every ten days, and why? Is he waiting to be raised — and is that what the deal with Strahd is for?
- Whose sunlight is the wicker sun? Sirius noted the Baron is the only one in this town invoking Lathander’s light. It is a very burnable symbol, and the ball is, quote, “currently” empty.
- Is Bluto inside the sea monster yet? We keep meaning to get to the lake. Choices were made.